Benefits Of An Aptitude Test In High School

Aptitude tests provide valuable benefits for high school students. Our last post discussed picking the proper aptitude test for your high school student. In this post, we’ll delve into why your student should take an aptitude test in the first place.

Students Discover Their Problem-Solving Aptitudes

Aptitude tests show high school students the type of problems they have a knack for solving.

Your student’s career path will center around the problems they solve in that career. For example, physicians solve medical issues. Likewise, lawyers solve legal problems.

High school students’ biggest career challenge is their lack of life experience. Since they’ve never been an engineer, a therapist, or a doctor before, they don’t know if they’d make a good one. Aptitude tests help remedy that.

Students Use Problem Solving Aptitudes to Choose Career

To illustrate, let’s say your student wishes to become a doctor. They want to solve medical problems. THAT’S GREAT! However, they don’t know what kind of medical problems they’d be good at solving.

There exist numerous kinds of physicians. However, for the sake of simplicity, let’s say your student has narrowed it down to three options: an ER Doctor or a Radiologist.

Both medical professions center around solving different medical problems. Take a look at the summaries of each position below.

• ER Doctor: fast-paced trauma care and medical crisis management
• Radiologist: systematic analysis of medical images

An aptitude test would show which professional tasks your student would excel in.

Let’s say this student took an aptitude test. Their aptitude test results showed that the student has a knack for working with images. Furthermore, regarding their problem-solving aptitudes, this student thrives on solving problems they have time to reflect on, as opposed to making quick, snap decisions.

This student should consider becoming a radiologist more than an ER doctor.

The fast-paced environment of an emergency room wouldn’t play to their strengths (the student’s reflective nature), and the student’s talent for remembering images might also go underutilized.

The primary benefit here is the student knows which tasks will come naturally to them. And while they’ll need to learn vital skills in med school, they can plan their career confidently, knowing they would excel with the primary responsibilities of this career.

Find Your Student’s Project Management Aptitudes

Does your student procrastinate their homework assignments? An aptitude test might tell you why?

There’s one aptitude score we measure called Time Frame Orientation. It measures how students perceive the future.

Imagine how this aptitude might impact a high school student’s project management.

High Time Frame Orientation

Students with a high Time Frame Orientation think years out into their future. As a result, they often have very ambitious goals for their education. From earning a PhD, to founding a start-up, becoming a famous influencer on youtube, or writing a best-selling novel, these students are drawn to projects that take years to complete.

There’s a huge perk to this: they’re often willing to delay instant gratification. Instead, they’ll invest their time and effort into unrewarding tasks that will eventually come to fruition. When they start these projects, they often approach them with great enthusiasm and energy.

Here are some of the perks of having a High Time Frame Orientation:

• Willingness to put forth unrewarding effort toward something that eventually pays off
• Possess a far future-focused mindset
• Gravitate toward projects that take years to complete

Think about a student who wants to become a writer. There’s nothing immediately rewarding about sitting alone on a keyboard and typing a 100,000 novel. Likewise, attending years of graduate school and grinding out a dissertation to get a Ph.D. takes time.

As you might have guessed, here lies the challenge with High Time Frame orientation students: they always think there’s going to be more time to complete things. Sometimes. They may also bite off more than they can chew, like this person:

Because their minds think so far out into the future, they’re more likely to procrastinate. This is especially true when the task they’re procrastinating on doesn’t interest them.

They can fix this, though, by keeping a calendar or by using a project management tool. For example, High Time Frame Orientation students might learn to use a google calendar and set the notifications on their phone to alert them more regularly. Additionally, using checklists or checklist apps like asana might keep their ambitious goals more grounded.

Low Time Frame Orientation

Students with Low Time Frame Orientations thrive in completing short-term projects. Depending on their level of dedication, managing the deadlines for papers, assignments, and projects may come naturally to them. Low Time Frame students may even find they often don’t need calendars to remind them of their short-term deadlines.

Here are some general benefits for students with a Low Time Frame Aptitude:

• Motivated by immediate rewards
• Great at remembering and juggling short-term deadlines
• Naturally wired to complete the deadlines found in high school or college

In the time I’ve administered aptitude tests, I’ve tested six valedictorians. Five of them had a Low Time Frame Orientation. While a high school student’s aptitude test scores don’t determine the caliber of student they’ll be, their aptitudes make certain tasks in schools easier. This is definitely the case with students with lower Time Frame Orientations.

Think about it. When you boil it down, high school and college require students to juggle short-term tasks. So, it’s no wonder why dedicated students with a Low Time Frame Orientation thrive under the short-term pressures of school.

With that said, every aptitude score, whether high or low, has its drawbacks. For the high school student with a Low Time Frame Orientation, can you guess what they struggle with? I’ll give you a hint, it’s in the image below:

It’s planning for the long term. Here are some general challenges for high school students with a Low Time Frame Orientation:

• Struggle to think about the repercussions of short-term decisions
• Likely to prioritize short-term tasks with immediate rewards over long-term tasks
• Less likely to consider long-term goals (5-10 years in the future).

Short Time Frame Students often face great stress once they graduate from high school. Before graduating, their lives have been comfortably scripted for them. Due to their awesome short-term task management skills, while they may not have “liked” school, many certainly excel at it. But that security comes crashing down when they have to apply to college.

They have to choose which college to go to. They’ve often given little thought to the question, “What should my college major be?” Now, they have to make those decisions in a short time.

Students with a Low Time Frame Orientation benefit from serious goal setting. This helps them ensure that their short-term projects advance them towards a long-term goal. They often benefit from meeting with coaches or friends and urge them to consider their long-term plans.

Time Frame Orientation as a Career Aptitude

A career aptitude test for high school students shows how time frame affects students’ careers. For example, an architect with a High Time Frame Orientation might find projects with industrial construction more meaningful than residential projects. Industrial projects typically take years to complete, while residential projects take months to finish.

Regardless of their desired career, we can agree it benefits students to know their Time Frame.

See Careers That Match Your Student’s Aptitude Test Results

While aptitude tests don’t tell students which career to pick, they can tell them where to start. Through a blend of psychology and data science, the right aptitude test gives your student a list of careers that match their strengths.

Data-Driven Career Recommendations

As we said in our previous post, we use the Highlands Ability Battery for aptitude testing. A crucial reason for choosing the Highlands Ability Battery (HAB) is the interactive career report.

The HAB uses all the data of ONET (the Department of Labor’s career database) in its reports. This provides two incredible benefits to high school students:

1. Students receive a list of the top 50 careers that align with their aptitudes
2. Students can see the average salaries, education requirements, and competitiveness of their careers (see below)

Simplify Career Your Student’s Research

This data provides students with a powerful head start toward their dream job. It also cuts down dozens of hours of career research since the reports already have it organized for you.

This doesn’t just help students but parents as well. Because, as you might have guessed, parents are the ones who often end up doing the majority of their student’s career research.

Aptitude Tests Show How Students Best Learn

Finally, what if an aptitude could show you how your student best learns? Spoiler alert: it can.

An advanced aptitude test provides an analysis of how your students remember information. In the aptitude testing world, we call these learning channels or the method by which high school students best process and remember information.

If you look at the image below, you’ll see the five learning channels that are measured:

• Verbal Memory
• Tonal Memory
• Rhythm Memory
• Design Memory
• Number Memory

Having this data can sometimes make or break a student’s education. For example, if your student has low verbal memory, reading their notes will be ineffective and more difficult for them.

However, with a high tonal memory, a student retains better through listening. This means that listening to their notes or an audiobook will be a much more effective learning strategy.

Now, just imagine a student going their entire high school career studying ineffectively. There’s a good chance this student is convinced that they’re not near as bright as their peers. The truth is that they could have just been studying the wrong way.

In our next post, we’ll explore the learning channels in more detail. But you can see how valuable those insights alone are.

Conclusion

Investing in a high school aptitude test provides a strategic advantage for your student. As we’ve discussed today, students learn their optimal problem-solving type, their project management aptitude, a list of careers that match their strengths, and how they best learn.

Use this link to schedule a free consultation with our aptitude specialist today! To learn more about the benefits of aptitude testing, subscribe to our newsletter now.

Happy Testing!